Biopharmaceutical plants produce biopharmaceutical products through biological methods. Typical biopharmaceutical synthesis methods are mammalian cell culture, microbial fermentation and insect cell culture. Occasionally, biopharmaceutical products are produced from natural animal or plant sources or by a synthetic technique called solid phase synthesis. Mammalian cell culture, microbial fermentation and insect cell culture involve the growth of living cells and the extraction of biopharmaceutical products from the cells or the medium surrounding the cells. Solid phase synthesis and crude tissue extraction are processes by which biopharmaceuticals are synthesized from chemicals or extracted from natural plant or animal tissues, respectively.
The process for producing biopharmaceuticals is complex. In addition to basic synthesis, additional processing steps of separation, purification, conditioning and formulation are required to produce the end product biopharmaceutical. Each of these processing steps includes additional unit operations. For example, the step of purification may include the step of Product Adsorption Chromatography, which may further include the unit operations of High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), Medium Pressure Liquid Chromatography (MPLC), Low Pressure Liquid Chromatography (LPLC), etc. The production of biopharmaceuticals is complex because of the number, complexity and combinations of synthesis methods and processing steps possible. Consequently, the design of a biopharmaceutical plant is expensive.
Tens of millions of dollars can be misspent during the design and construction phases of biopharmaceutical plants due to inadequacies in the design process. Errors and inefficiencies are introduced in the initial design of the biopharmaceutical production process because no effective tools for modeling and simulating a biopharmaceutical production process exists. The inadequacies in the initial process design carry through to all phases of the biopharmaceutical plant design and construction. Errors in the basic production process design propagate through all of the design and construction phases, resulting in increased cost due to change orders late in the facility development project. For example, detailed piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) normally cost thousands of dollars per diagram. Problems in the biopharmaceutical production process design frequently necessitate the re-working of these detailed P&IDs. This adds substantially to the overall cost of design and construction of a biopharmaceutical plant.
There are generally three phases of biopharmaceutical plants which coincide with the different levels of drug approval by the FDA. A Clinical Phase I/II biopharmaceutical plant produces enough biopharmaceutical product to support both phase I and phase II clinical testing of the product which may involve up to a few hundred patients. A Clinical Phase III biopharmaceutical plant produces enough biopharmaceutical product to support two to three-thousand patients during phase III clinical testing. A Clinical Phase III plant will also produce enough of the biopharmaceutical drug to support an initial commercial offering upon the licensing of the drug by the FDA for commercial sale. The successive phases represent successively larger biopharmaceutical facilities to support full scale commercial production after product licensing. Often the production process design is repeated for each phase, resulting in increased costs to each phase of plant development.
The design, architecture and engineering of biopharmaceutical plants is a several hundred million dollars per year industry because of the complex nature of biopharmaceutical production. Design of biopharmaceutical plants occurs in discrete phases. The first phase is the conceptual design phase. The first step in the conceptual design phase is identifying the high-level steps of the process that will produce the desired biopharmaceutical. Examples of high-level steps are synthesis, separation, purification and conditioning. After the high-level process steps have been identified, the unit operations associated with each of the high-level steps are identified. Unit operations are discrete process steps that make up the high-level process steps. In a microbial fermentation process, for example, the high-level step of synthesis may include the unit operations of inoculum preparation, flask growth, seed fermentation and production fermentation.
The unit operation level production process is typically designed by hand and is prone to errors and inefficiencies. Often, in the conceptual design phase, the specifications for the final production process are not complete. Therefore some of the equipment design parameters, unit operation yields and actual production rates for the various unit operations must be estimated. These factors introduce errors into the initial design base of the production process. Additionally, since the production process is designed by hand, attempting to optimize the process for efficiency and production of biopharmaceutical products is impractically time consuming.
Scale calculations for each of the unit operations are performed to determine the size and capacity of the equipment necessary to produce the desired amount of product per batch. Included in the scale calculations is the number of batches per year needed to produce the required amount of biopharmaceutical product. A batch is a single run of the biopharmaceutical process that produces the product. Increasing the size and capacity of the equipment increases the amount of product produced per batch. The batch cycle time is the amount of time required to produce one batch of product. The amount of product produced in a given amount of time, therefore, is dependent upon the amount produced per batch, and the batch cycle time. The scale calculations are usually executed by hand to determine the size and capacity of the equipment that will be required in each of the unit operations. Since the scale calculations are developed from the original conceptual design parameters, they are also subject to the same errors inherent in the initial conceptual design base.
Typically a process flow diagram is generated after the scale calculations for the unit operations have been performed. The process flow diagram graphically illustrates the process equipment such as tanks and pumps necessary to accommodate the process for a given batch scale. The process flow diagram illustrates the different streams of product and materials through the different unit operations. Generally associated with the process flow diagram is a material balance table which shows the quantities of materials consumed and produced in each step of the biopharmaceutical production process. The material balance table typically includes rate information of consumption of raw materials and production of product. The process flow diagram and material balance table provides much of the information necessary to develop a preliminary equipment list. The preliminary equipment list shows the equipment necessary to carry out all of the unit operations in the manufacturing procedure. Since the process flow diagram, material balance table and preliminary equipment list are determined from the original conceptual design parameters, they are subject to the same errors inherent in the initial conceptual design base.
A preliminary facility layout for the plant is developed from the process flow diagram, material balance table and preliminary equipment list. The preliminary facility layout usually begins with a bubble or block diagram of the plant that illustrates the adjacencies of rooms housing different high-level steps, as well as a space program which dimensions out the space and square footage of the building. From this information a preliminary equipment layout for the plant is prepared. The preliminary equipment layout attempts to show all the rooms in the plant, including corridors, staircases, etc. Mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineers estimate the mechanical, electrical and plumbing needs, respectively, of the facility based on the facility design layout and the utility requirements of the manufacturing equipment. Since the preliminary facility layout is developed from the original conceptual design parameters, they are subject to the same errors inherent in the initial conceptual design base.
Typically the next phase of biopharmaceutical plant design is preliminary piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) design. Preliminary P&IDs are based on the process flow diagram from the conceptual design phase. Often the calculations on the process design are re-run and incorporated into the preliminary P&ID. The preliminary P&IDs incorporate the information from the material balance table with the preliminary equipment list to show the basic piping and instrumentation required to run the manufacturing process.
Detailed design is the next phase of biopharmaceutical plant design. Plans and specifications which allow vendors and contractors to bid on portions of the biopharmaceutical plant are developed during the detailed design. Detailed P&IDs are developed which schematically represent every detail of the process systems for the biopharmaceutical plant. The detailed P&IDs include for example, the size and components of process piping, mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems; all tanks, instrumentation, controls and hardware. A bill of materials and detailed specification sheets on all of the equipment and systems are developed from the P&IDs. Detailed facility architecture diagrams are developed that coincide with the detailed P&IDs and equipment specifications. The detailed P&IDs and facility construction diagrams allow builders and engineering companies to bid on the biopharmaceutical plant project. Since the preliminary and detailed P&IDs are developed from the original conceptual design parameters, they are subject to the same errors inherent in the initial conceptual design base. Reworking the preliminary and detailed P&IDs due to errors in the conceptual design phase can cost thousands of dollars per diagram.
The inability to accurately model and simulate the biopharmaceutical production process drives inaccurate initial design. Often, these inaccuracies result in changes to the design and construction diagrams at the plant construction site, or repair and reconstruction of the plant during the construction phase resulting in millions of dollars in additional cost.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for accurately simulating and modeling a biopharmaceutical production process. A method and system for simulating and modeling biopharmaceutical production process would allow designers to reduce the number of errors introduced into plant design at the earliest stages. Such a system and method would allow an engineer to validate the production process design and maximize the efficiency of the plant by finding the optimum equipment configurations. Such a system and method would generate detailed specifications for the equipment and process steps that would smooth the transition throughout all of the design phases and fix the cost of design and construction of a biopharmaceutical facility. The present invention can also be used for determining the cost of goods for a product.